60 Seconds with WITS MidAtlantic Speaker — Lauren Maffeo

Lauren Maffeo is a Senior Content Analyst at Gartner Digital Markets. Her session at WITS MidAtlantic is Erase Unconscious Bias From Your AI Datasets.

Why is speaking at WITS important to you?

Because it’s easy to attend a “women in tech” event, meet so many accomplished women in the field, and forget how much work we still have left to do. I’m encouraged to see so many mainstream tech events making active efforts to enforce Codes of Conduct and recruit diverse speakers. But until we have more equal representation, events like WITS serve as an essential space for techies who might be minorities in their work environments.

What inspires you?

People who have the self-motivation to try something new. I have friends who moved abroad to switch careers, launched their own businesses after being laid off, taught themselves to code, and put themselves through grad school after unexpected pregnancies. How can I not be inspired by them?

Most useful article you’ve read in the last month

I read a LOT of articles, so it’s hard to pick just one. On a professional note, this article by Cassie Kozyrkov — Chief Intelligence Decision Engineer at Google — cuts to the heart of the talk that I’ll give at WITS Mid-Atlantic. On a personal note, this piece from The Cut on how to be lazy is something I’ve tried taking to heart in the midst of a hectic life season.

When you were a kid what was your dream job?

I’ve loved watching the news since I was young, which is both a blessing and a curse these days! My mom says I used to announce my name along with the news anchors from my high chair and called ABC News “ABCD News”. I started my career in tech as a reporter covering the sector from London, so it all came full circle :)

Tell us something about your session

“A young child defines the world purely on the small amount they can see…This is the root of dataset bias: intelligence based on information that’s too small or homogenous.”

Anything else you would like to share

I took an “Intro to Python” course last year, and one of my 2019 goals is to contribute to an open source Python project.